“Yeah. Breast cancer just like you. She almost gave up the treatment plenty of times. I was a junior in college, and I went home to take care of her. She was ten years older than I was.”

“Was?” Alex asked nervously, and he smiled.

“Is. She got through it. You'll get through it too. But you have to do the chemo, no matter how bad it gets, or how terrible it is, or how much you hate it. You've got to do it.”

“I know. It scares the hell out of me. Six months seems like forever.”

“It isn't,” he said, sounding older than he was. “Dead is forever.”

“I get it. Honest.”

“You can't screw around, Alex. You have to take the pills, no matter how sick they make you, and go for the treatments. I'll go with you if you want. I went with her. She hated them, and she was afraid of needles.”

“I can't say I loved it either, but it didn't seem so bad, until I started puking my brains out. But then again, it's one way to meet friends.” She smiled up at him and he grinned. He wasn't wearing his glasses and his tie was askew. He had a blond boyish look, but at the same time, his eyes said he was much wiser. At thirty-two, he had seen a lot more than she knew. He had an old soul, and a good heart, and he really liked her.

“Shall we go back to work?” she asked after a little while, and Liz was just putting some mail on her desk, and was surprised to see them both come out of the bathroom.

“Hi,” Alex said casually, “we were having a meeting.”

Liz laughed, and had no idea what they were doing in there, but it seemed funny to her as she went back to her desk.

“People are going to think we're shooting up or snorting cocaine if we keep this up,” Alex laughed, “or having sex in the bathroom.”

“I can think of worse rumors than that.” He laughed easily, and sat down across the desk from her. She was looking better.

“Yeah. Me too.” She hadn't made love with Sam in almost two months and they weren't likely to be doing it again soon, from the look of things between them. But sex didn't seem much of an issue. Survival was more to the point. That was the only issue at the moment. They worked together all afternoon, and at the end of the day, he got her a cab again, although she insisted she felt fine. And on Friday, she managed to take Annabelle to ballet. Remarkably, she was doing everything she needed to. And she wasn't feeling great, but she wasn't totally out of commission either. And she was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, she'd survive it. Whether or not her marriage would was another thing. She thought that a great deal less likely.





Chapter 13

Dr. Webber was very pleased with Alex's progress the following Monday. “You're doing fine,” she complimented her. Her blood count was good. And they were able to do the intravenous treatment, preceded by dextrose and water, which was a little less traumatic for Alex, now that she knew what to expect from the treatment.

This time she got just as sick, but it didn't come as big a surprise to her. And Brock continued to nurse her, and Liz to watch her like a guardian angel.

“I'm starting to feel guilty about this,” she said to Brock, as they sat on her bathroom floor again the day after her second treatment.

“Why?” He looked puzzled.

“Because you're not having chemotherapy, I am. Why should you have to go through all this? You're not married to me. This is my nightmare, not yours. You don't have to do this.” She couldn't understand why he was so kind to her. There was no reason for it, though it certainly helped her. He was the only person who was really there for her at the moment.

“Why not share it?” he said simply. “Why not let someone else help you? It could happen to any of us. Lightning can strike any one of us at any moment. No one's exempt. And if I'm here for you, maybe someone will be there for me one day, if it ever happens.”

“I will,” she said gently. “I'll be there for you, Brock. I'll never forget this.” And they both knew she meant it.

“I'm actually doing this for a raise,” he said laughingly, as he helped her up. They had been there for an hour. It had been a very rough morning.

“I figured you had to have an ulterior motive,” she grinned. She was a lot more tired this week after the treatment. And Thanksgiving was in two days. It exhausted her just thinking about doing the turkey. “Why not take my job?” she said jokingly as they sat down again. “You'd be great at it.”

“I'd rather work with you.” He looked at her as he said it, and for an odd moment she felt something different between them. She wasn't sure what it meant, or if she should acknowledge it. But she looked away, embarrassed for a moment. She was so open with him now, so free, and she wondered if maybe she shouldn't. Maybe they were getting too close. After all, she was a married woman. But he was also just a kid, as she reminded herself, he was ten years younger than she was.

“I like working with you too, Brock,” she said kindly, treating him like her junior again, and then she laughed at herself, which was one of the things he loved about her, “when I'm not throwing up all over you.”

“I'm very careful to stand behind you,” he said in the way that only people who had been through what they had together could get away with.

“You're disgusting.”

They talked about their Thanksgiving plans late that afternoon. He was going to friends in Connecticut, and she was staying home with Annabelle and Sam. She confessed to him then that she wasn't enthusiastic about doing the cooking.

“Why doesn't he do it then? Can he cook?”

“Well enough, but Thanksgiving is my specialty.” And then she admitted something she hadn't told anyone else. “I feel like I have to prove something to him. He's very angry about all this. Sometimes I think he hates me for it. I need to show him that I can still do everything I used to, that nothing's changed.” It sounded so pathetic when she said it, but he seemed to understand perfectly. Better than Sam did.

“It's only changed temporarily. Can't he understand that? Even if you can't do it now, you will later.”

“He's still too angry to see that.”

“That's rough on you.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

“How's your little one holding up?”

“She's doing okay. She gets worried when I'm sick, and I try to keep it away from her as much as possible. None of this is easy.”

“You need good friends to help you through it,” he said warmly.

“I'm lucky to have you.” She smiled at him. And the night before Thanksgiving, she gave him a hug and told him that she was thankful for him this year. They went downstairs together, and for an odd instant, she felt sad when she left him. She could be so honest and outspoken with him. While she sat throwing up next to him, she had come to rely on him, and on being able to tell him her feelings. Suddenly a four-day holiday without talking to him seemed very lonely.

And when she got home, she saw the turkey in the refrigerator, and thought of all the work she had to do the next day, making stuffing and yams, and popovers, and vegetables and mashed potatoes. And Sam always liked both pumpkin and mince pie, and Annabelle liked apple. And she had promised to make pureed chestnuts this year, and homemade cranberry sauce. It made her feel ill just thinking about it, but she knew that this year, more than any year, she really had to. She felt as though her relationship with Sam was resting on it, and how much she could prove to him that she could still do it.

He had had his own tender partings at the office too. Daphne was going to Washington, D.C., that night to visit friends, and he felt an ache of loneliness when he took her to the train and watched her leave. He was getting more and more attached to her, and more and more unhappy whenever he didn't see her. It frightened him to know he would be alone with Alex for four days, but he acknowledged that maybe it would do them good. But as soon as he got home that night, he realized that it wasn't going to be easy to pretend that things were the way they always had been.

She was lying on their bed with an ice pack on her head, and she had just thrown up, Annabelle told him.

“Mommy's sick,” she said quietly, “will we still have turkey?”

“Of course we will,” he reassured her, and put her to bed, and then came back to look at his wife, stretched out miserably on their bed. “Do you want to go to a restaurant tomorrow and just forget it?” he asked, with a tone of accusation.

“Don't be silly,” Alex said, wishing they could forget the whole thing, but of course they couldn't. “I'll be fine.”

“You don't look fine.” He was always torn between thinking she was exaggerating, and it was really psychological, and feeling sorry for her. It was hard for him to know what to think. “Can I get you anything? Ginger ale? Coke? Something to settle your stomach?” She was guzzling whole bottles of Maalox these days, but nothing helped her.

She got up again after a little while, and went to do what she could in the kitchen. She set the table for the next day, and as she did, she realized that each step was an agony. She felt crushed by exhaustion. Her whole body ached, and she wondered if she was coming down with the flu, or just having more side effects from the chemo. Her bladder bothered her too that night, and by the time she got to bed, Sam was asleep and she felt like death and she looked it. He had promised to help her in the morning.

She set her alarm clock for six-fifteen, so she could put the turkey in the oven. It was a big bird, and it would take a long time to cook. They ate their Thanksgiving dinner at noon usually. But when she got up, she was too sick to move, and she lost an hour throwing up as quietly as she could in the bathroom.